


Angels Seen on High

by heartswells



Series: Medical History AUs [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Civil War, Alternate Universe - War, Amputation, Angels, Battle of Antietam, Chloroform, Christianity, Death, Delirium, Fevers, Gore, Gunshot Wounds, Hallucinations, Heaven, Historical Medical Practice, M/M, Pyemia, Religious Themes, Sacrilege, United States Civil War, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-12-17 04:24:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21048248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartswells/pseuds/heartswells
Summary: Tyson came back to awareness a few minutes later when he felt the searing pain of someone prodding at his wound. He opened his eyes and above him saw a brilliant white sky. It was the cloth of the tent, but, possessed by his fever, he mistook it for the glorious light of heaven, and he blinked rapidly, awed by the beauty and brightness of his death. Then, above him appeared a man, no—“You’re an angel,” Tyson slurred in awe.





	Angels Seen on High

**Author's Note:**

> a massive thank you to [M](https://greecedlightning.tumblr.com/) for indulging and encouraging me. you're a gem. ♥️
> 
> sources, notes on historical references, and notes on medical references are included at the end.
> 
> **trigger warning: war, blood, gore, religious themes (heaven, hell, damnation, angels, blasphemy, and sin), illness, animal death, and the character deaths of Samuel Girard and Cale Makar.**

When Tyson was a child, he had imagined that war raged, bright and furious. He had imagined it in technicolor, vibrant and vivid and ripe, bursting before the eyes in the boldest of golds and richest of reds. He had imagined that the voices of men would devolve, returning to those of the glorious gods that they were descended from and boom through the skies like thunder, amplified by the wrath of righteousness. He had believed that war was the apotheosis of humanity, that there was no grander a commemoration of justice than battle.

Now, at twenty eight, Major Tyson Barrie had learned that war was mankind’s starvation. There was no color, no sound, and no substance to it. Morality festered and rotted to inedibility, leaving them weeping and emaciated. The essence of spirit atrophied, and the earth became void of life, possessed solely by the desire to take it away. All was sickly, the human senses diseased, and the world deteriorated as if to reject their existences, proclaiming that, through bloodshed, they had forsaken their right to experience the world’s pleasures. They robbed her, and thus she robbed them. Colors decayed; music dulled. Divinity could no longer be perceived nor conceived. 

Major Tyson Barrie, after spending the last year decaying in war’s throes, had finally fallen. While attempting to gain control of Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam Creek, he’d been struck in the lower thigh by a minié ball. His femur was shattered and the surrounding tissue utterly mangled, and he lay shivering in a reeking puddle of horse blood, nestled beneath the body of Captain Erik Johnson’s fallen mare, Comical. Her body was a miserable shelter, and Tyson loathed that he’d been reduced to such contemptuous actions. Tyson had known both Comical and Erik since youth, and he loved them both; he did not wish to treat her so disgracefully in death, but he was desperate.

Tyson and Comical had fallen near simultaneously, and he had dragged himself beneath her, believing that Erik would return to mourn her after the battle and discover him there as well. After the death of Private Samuel Girard (a frightful succumbing to Pyemia that plagued Erik’s dreams), Erik had forcibly detached himself from human companionship. Bitterly jaded, he’d retreated into self-isolation, seeking solace solely in his horses in a futile attempt to prevent himself from having to endure anymore loss. But war’s casualties were not confined to humans, and Erik’s horses had fallen as well. Comical had been the last horse remaining from Erik’s pre-war ranch, and her death was a cruel step towards Erik’s complete severance from the peace of his past. Tyson, though he did not realize it, represented the final thread of sanity and continuity in Erik’s life, and it was he who Erik would return to seek, not Comical. Erik could not bear to lose Tyson. He did not believe he could survive it. 

It had been hours since Tyson had fallen, and the battle had moved on, but Tyson remained imprisoned by his injury. Overhead, carrion birds shrieked in a shrill, hideous mockery of the lamenting cries of the mothers whose sons lay bleeding on the battlefield. As Tyson lay awaiting his death, he feared the birds more than he feared the rebels. They flocked to evil too eagerly, their punishing beaks voraciously tearing out the eyes and tongues of the weak so that they were condemned to stumble into the afterlife blinded and silenced. Though Tyson could not actually see the swarms through the noxious artillery smoke that still clouded the air, he could hear their heavy, black wings beating as they searched for him. 

The sun set quickly, foreshadowing the coming autumn, and night cast its black veil of mourning over the pastures. With it came a cruel, vengeful cold, and Tyson, soaked in blood, shivered violently. The night was still; no one had yet returned from the army to search for the wounded. In a purer timeline, Tyson would be roaming his family’s apple orchard, preparing for the upcoming harvest with Erik. He yearned to return to that life: to days spent giggling as Erik struggled to toothlessly bite into apples pulled from Tyson’s favorite tree; to evenings spent listening to Erik lisp through tuneless songs as he groomed his horses; to nights spent watching the stars and warming themselves with whiskey. He yearned to return to the days when Erik was Erik and not the estranged Captain Johnson. 

He hoped Erik would forgive him for dying.

(Erik would forgive Tyson, but he would forgive no one else, and at the gates of hell, Erik would hold God accountable for both their sins.)

Night’s darkness soothed Tyson’s sight, freeing him from the sight of the carnage surrounding him, but it bore with it new torments. His other senses heightened in the absence of sight, and death assaulted him in her other forms. The scent of it invaded his lungs and sank down his nose and throat as heavily and viciously as crude oil, suffocating him with its plague-bearing pungence. The silence haunted Tyson most. It was as if the world, overwhelmed by its self-induced pain, could no longer bear to use its voice, and, ashamed of its affinity for terror, it silenced itself. The wounded, the dying, and the dead were equally silent. The quiet felt like dissonance; like counter-intuitivity; like hunger; like the visceral, heart-aching emptiness experienced when need is weaponized and vital things are held aloft, suspended within reach but completely unattainable. 

When Tyson had initially been shot, there had been no pain, and he had almost believed his injury to be a hallucination. But a sting had set in, and then a throb, and afterwards, a burn. Now, finally, he was consumed by absolute agony. The blood-fed mud that he lay soaking in had seeped through his clothing, and it caked the wound, and it itched abhorrently. Tyson thanked the darkness for preventing him from seeing the hordes of insects he felt feeding inside it. 

A voice muttered deliriously behind Tyson. It was hushed and childlike, and Tyson strained to listen. He could not understand the words, but their cadence reminded him of a lullaby his mother used to sing him. Tyson realized suddenly who the voice belonged to: Private Cale Makar, atrociously young and sickeningly undeserving of his fated death. Cale did not scream for help—no one did—and Tyson wondered at the horrific implications of it. Was it a lack of hope or a lack of desire? Philosophers often claimed that the will to live was strange, persisting when least expected, but in this moment, Tyson deemed it perfectly predictable. 

The night deepened and grew even colder, and a fever settled inside Tyson. He burned as he shivered, fading in and out of consciousness. Moonless and starless, the night ticked on, and Private Makar’s whispering stopped. Tyson was not sure that he slept exactly; rather, time blurred, passing in a rhythm that he couldn’t quite understand. One moment, he shook in the dark as mosquitoes ravaged him. The next, the sun was gleaming, and he was brought to awareness by rough jostling.

“Hush, Tyson.” It was Erik, who’d spent the night searching for Tyson since the end of the battle. The rebels had retreated, and though it was not quite a win, they had gained control of Antietam. Erik shouldn’t be out looking for the wounded—certainly not with his rank—but Tyson had concluded long ago that Erik contained the blood of the kings of old, for his fortitude and loyalty were immeasurable. Thus, Erik gathered him in his arms. It bent Tyson’s leg awkwardly, setting his wound aflame, and though he should really allow Tyson to be carried away on a stretcher with medical staff, Erik felt possessive. He wanted to ensure that Tyson was taken to the Union Army’s best surgeon, a close friend of Erik’s and a skilled physician trained in Sweden, Gabriel Landeskog. 

Erik slipped into the hospital tent and set Tyson in a pool of drying blood on a table. He nodded to the assisting surgeons, Joseph Compher and Matthew Nietto, and confirmed that Dr. Landeskog would care for Tyson momentarily. Erik could not stay—already, he should not be there at all—but Tyson grabbed his hand, and Erik felt frozen. Maybe if he did not move, then time would not pass, and Tyson could not die. Tyson’s eyes fluttered shut, and Erik pressed his lips to his forehead for what he feared was a harrowingly insufficient last goodbye. Tyson’s skin burned as if he’d already descended into hell. Erik could protect him no longer. He turned and left.

Tyson came back to awareness a few minutes later when he felt the searing pain of someone prodding at his wound. He opened his eyes and above him saw a brilliant white sky. It was the cloth of the tent, but, possessed by his fever, he mistook it for the glorious light of heaven, and he blinked rapidly, awed by the beauty and brightness of his death. Then, above him appeared a man, no—

“You’re an angel,” Tyson slurred in awe. The man seemed to be spun of gold and carved of diamonds, unspeakably breathtaking and exactly as Tyson had always imagined. His vision was blurred and spotted by sickness, and in his delirium, Tyson mistook the sweat and oil glistening on the angel’s skin for silver infused in his veins and the blue in his eyes for the infinite reflection of heaven’s skies and seas. In his feverish mind, the angel’s blood and pus caked clothing were luxurious robes of rich red roses, and the heavy worry set in his face was but the piercing gaze of divine judgement.

  


“Hello, Tyson. I am Army Surgeon Gabriel—”

“I know who Gabriel is,” Tyson interrupted, and then recited, “_I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.” _

Gabriel looked to Joseph and frowned. Matthew shook his head sadly. Tyson’s fever was high, his wound grievous, and his mind deteriorating. These were poor omens of fate.

“Major Barrie,” Gabriel began, hoping that calling upon his rank might jolt him back into reality. Tyson’s face crumbled, suddenly miserable.

“Are you damning me? I don’t blame you. I know I’ve killed people,” Tyson confessed. He had always thought that he would meet God after death, but maybe God didn’t waste time on soldiers with no hope for heaven. Maybe his angels judged instead.

“What? No.” Matthew placed a dropcloth over Tyson’s mouth and nose, and chloroform flooded Tyson’s body. Gabriel moved down to Tyson’s right leg to examine his injury, and he grimaced. It was sinister. Upon impact, his femur had shattered and then the bullet itself had broken into pieces, destroying the surrounding nerves and arteries. The wound was encrusted with mud and blood, a hideous, gelatinous mess of torn flesh, scabs, muscle, and bone. There was no alternative but to amputate, for the bone could not be healed, all the shards removed, nor the nerves repaired, and though Gabriel was renown for his skill, he doubted Tyson’s survival. 

“We are going to amputate your leg, Major Barrie,” Gabriel attempted to inform him, but Tyson could not understand him. He concluded that they must speak a different language in heaven which irritated him slightly. 

There was a knife in the angels hands now and—_oh_. He wasn’t dead yet, and he realized that he should be afraid, but as he watched the angel flit about the table, he felt only peace. For what a grandiose proposition it was to be altered by an angel!

The chloroform lulled Tyson as Joseph tightened and buckled the tourniquet around Tyson’s upper thigh to slow the inevitable bleeding. Gabriel mapped out a pattern in his mind, deciding that he would use rectangular flaps for the procedure despite the extra minutes it would take. Joseph braced himself against Tyson’s left leg and shoulder while Matthew braced himself against the right side to hold him still, and Gabriel wrapped his left hand around Tyson’s injured thigh, preparing to cut. Tyson groaned—no—Tyson _ hummed_, and Gabriel became bizarrely aware that he was singing. Men often cried and called out to loved ones under the anesthetic, but Gabriel had never, in hundreds of procedures, heard one sing before. He recognized neither the tune nor the lyrics but its notes were unmistakable. 

There were many surgeries to be done still and many men waiting, so Gabriel refocused. It took considerable strength to pierce to the bone with the swiftness the procedure required so he widened his stance and braced. Then, he carved two cuts longitudinally on each side of Tyson’s thigh, shoving hard to meet the bone. Blood torrented forth, drenching him; his apron never dried on nights after battle. He angled the knife atop Tyson’s thigh to create a long rectangular flap; next, he repeated his cuts underneath to create a much shorter flap. Tyson babbled and thrashed in Joseph and Matthew’s holds, but the anesthetic was effective, and he felt no pain. Still, with every cut, Gabriel anticipated screams, and he awaited the fateful day when he would act too soon or the anesthetic would run out. Maybe in the afterlife, that would be his punishment for his transgressions; maybe he would be forced to operate on unanesthetized sinners in a sickening cycle of cruelty wherein his punishment was to punish others.

Matthew grabbed tissue retractors, long, flat strips of metal, and used them to pull back the flaps Gabriel had created, pushing up the flesh so that the bone may be cut higher. The unfortunate placement of Tyson’s wound prevented Gabriel from severing the bone at a joint which would have been apt to make a smoother cut. With a capital saw, Gabriel sawed, first going slowly to establish a groove; once he had created one, he sped up, and the hideous scraping of metal against bone hissed in their ears. With a repulsive snap, the saw finally cut through, and Gabriel tossed the leg into a monstrous pile of limbs along the back wall where it became insignificant, no longer Tyson’s to claim. Gabriel trimmed the splintered edges of the sawed bone with roungers and sanded them flat with a bone file. Then, he isolated arteries and large blood vessels with a scalpel, threaded through them with a tenaculum, and tied them off with silken threads. And finally, after seven critical minutes, he sutured shut the wound and bandaged it.

  


Through it all, Tyson hummed, a hideous, broken hymn, and it disturbed Gabriel more than any cry or plea that he had ever heard. In Gabriel’s hell, Tyson had hallucinated heaven. It was within these tents, sowing the consequences of war, that Gabriel had lost his faith, disillusioned and abused and abandoned. Yet Tyson had looked upon Gabriel and identified divinity, and he had found his God actualized. Doubtless, it was but a fever dream, a gift of the anesthesia, and nothing more, and upon waking, he would once again see nothing but hopelessness, if he woke at all. But now, here, where Gabriel had lost his humanity, where Erik had lost his will, and where thousands had lost their lives, Tyson had found his heaven.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Misc. Note: I chose Matt Nietto, JT Compher, and Gabe as surgeons so that I could use their full names because I thought it would be fun if everyone Tyson saw while he believed he was in heaven had biblical names.
> 
> **Notes on Historical Liberties:**   
1\. The Battle of Antietam is cited as one of the first examples of the use of modern medical evacuation and ambulance techniques, implemented by Major Jonathan Letterman. Wounded soldiers would have been transported by staff and volunteers with relative speed. EJ’s rescue of Tyson is inaccurate and nothing more than a plot device for my own enjoyment.   
2\. I have, through the title, implied that Tyson was humming “Angels We Have Heard on High”. However, that song was not translated into English until 1862, the same year as the Battle of Antietam.
> 
> **Notes on Medical References and Inaccuracies:**  
1\. Samuel Girard is cited as dying of Pyemia, a bacterial disease that caused the formation of pus in blood. It was a common, fatal disease resulting from the unsanitary treatment of wounds. (The Civil War occurred prior to germ theory and antiseptic techniques.)  
2\. It is a common misconception that Civil War soldiers underwent surgery without anesthesia. Both ether and chloroform were in widespread use by the 1860s. Thrashing and groaning were side effects of chloroform (which was used more often than ether) and may have led to the misconception that soldiers were in pain during amputations.  
3\. For as much as I read about and researched amputation, it was still a difficult scene to write and ended up much vaguer than I originally intended. The language in the published surgeon’s guides that I read was both oddly vague and archaic which made it difficult to detail.  
4\. The rate for survival of amputation is actually rather high! Tyson’s death is heavily implied because of his fever, not necessarily the procedure.
> 
> **Historical Sources on the Battle of Antietam:**  
1\. Civil War Army Organization and Order of Rank  
2\. Antietam: Animated Battle Map (Video)  
3\. Battle of Antietam Facts and Summary  
4\. The Battle of Antietam - Burnside’s Bridge - September 17, 1862 (12 PM - 1 PM)
> 
> **Historical Sources on Civil War Medical Practices:**   
1\. [The Story of the Pile of Limbs](http://www.civilwarmed.org/surgeons-call/limbs/)   
2\. [Wounds, Ammunition, and Amputation](http://www.civilwarmed.org/surgeons-call/amputation1/)   
3\. [Voices of the Wounded: The Battle of Gettysburg](http://www.civilwarmed.org/voices-gettysburg/)   
4\. [ “Unspeakable Agony:” The Union Wounded Left Behind at Chancellorsville](http://www.civilwarmed.org/voices-gettysburg/)   
5\. [Anesthesia in the Civil War](http://www.civilwarmed.org/surgeons-call/anesthesia1/)   
6\. [Civil War Battlefield Surgery](https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/cwsurgeon/cwsurgeon/amputations)   
7\. My Hands and Heart Full (How Did Civil War Surgeons Cope?)   
8\. A Civil War Surgeons Tools   
9\. Insturments & Techniques   
10\. Antique Surigical Instrument Identification   
11\.  J. H. Gemrig c. 1866 Instrument Catalog   
12\. Civil War Amputation Procedures   
13\.  Surturing Needles and Surturing During the Civil War Era   
14\. Chlroform, Ether, and the Civil War   
15\. Ligation of Arteries During the Civil War   
16\. Civil War Medicine: An Overview of Medicine   
17\. Illustrated Use of Surgical Instruments During the Civil War


End file.
